Things have gotten off to kind of a bad start, though. First, when I walked up to meet it, it had pinstripes applied to it. Pinstripes! That is such a big no to me that the salesman himself got up from his desk to remove them because he thought I might actually have a stroke. It snowed the night I brought it home and the next day, Sami and I were squabbling about what to do with the 8″ of snow covering it in the driveway ( him: use the filthy garage pushbroom to sweep it off; me: just let it sit there until it melts lest it get scratched up on Day 1) and I almost won when we looked out the window to see our helpful neighbors blowing the driveway and using their own brooms to clean off the car.

Those are single occurances, though and you cant change the past so no use fretting over them. There’s one more troublesome thing that happened and I hope to God that it’s not the beginning of a trend. It is this: the next day, we were driving along a wooded section of Route 80 in PA and without warning, a big red tailed hawk flapped up from the side of the road and flew straight for my car.

I thought for sure it was going to smack right into me but it’s trajectory was the few inches above my car that it needed to be. It was weird – I never saw one that close before. It was like a feathery artillery shell headed whizzing past me. I was doing about 75 and he was flying fast enough to go from ground launch to right past me sideways in the space of a split second.

Here’s the thing: remember that one summer where birds kept trying to commit suicide by flying in front of my car? I missed most of them but one unfortunate pigeon succeeded with a grand thump against my grill and then took his final ride on my front bumper, the wind lifting his lifeless wing up when the car was in motion and letting it fall when we were stopped. The thing is that that car was white, too.

Do birds have some kind of fatal attraction that compels them to fling themselves at their own peril towards white cars? Does this happen with all white cars? Does it happen to you? Is it going to keep happening to me? Do pinstripes scare aware birds? I don’t mind taking out a sparrow or a robin once in a while but if it’s going to be hawks,then were going to have some big messes all over my pretty sparkly car.

My mother and stepfather had a white escort wagon and they killed three redtailed hawks with it. They refuse to own a white car now because they swear that the birds can’t see them.

I’ve had a white civic for seven years and have never hit any birds with it, and it also seems to scare deer completely off the road from long distances so I’ve never come close to hitting any of them either. So I don’t know if mine makes some kind of threatening noise or what… maybe it’s a combination of factors + white that determines if predatory birds will suicide on a given vehicle.